Employees or participants in an enterprise system perform most or all of their job functions through software applications executing on computing devices that access the enterprise system. As the business world has become increasingly complex, systems have been designed to separate different aspects of business, for example, by creating separate software systems for emailing, word processing, database access, etc. Especially as a company grows, separation of databases and knowledge base may also be separated by business role, such as human resources and customer relations, which may each have a separate database and business logic, each with separate software interfaces. Thus, an employee of a company may spend more and more time switching between business applications, for example, “pulling up” data in one interface, and copying it into another. This may be referred to as switching contexts between programs or user interfaces. The employee may find it necessary to sift through databases or knowledge stores to search for information to include in a particular report or email that is being produced in a particular business productivity application (e.g., applications from MICROSOFT OFFICE of MICROSOFT CORPORATION of Redmond, Wash., OPEN OFFICE available at www.openoffice.org by SUN MICROSYSTEMS, INC., of Santa Clara, Calif., etc.). All trademarks herein are used solely for purposes of identification; all trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners. Note that the employee may know exactly what type of information or know that particular data exists, and yet still spend considerable effort finding where exactly on the enterprise system the data exists. Additionally, after finding the data, inclusion of the data into the business productivity application is not guaranteed, depending on the format in which the data exists and/or support by the business productivity application for the data.
Thus, despite the power of computing devices, and the general convenience of known user interfaces (UIs), especially graphical user interfaces (GUIs), and business productivity applications, an employee may spend time finding and including known, existing data that could be used more productively in other ways. Traditional interfacing to enterprise data via existing UIs involves multiple, unrelated desktop applications. The use of multiple independent applications has at least the defect of being time-consuming. Depending on the applications being used, the use of the multiple, independent applications can result in security risks or inconsistencies, and/or data access, retrieval, or use problems. The business productivity applications may be inadequately designed for enterprise access desired by participants in an enterprise system.